[chef] Manage uids and gids without numbers?

[Bryan Berry < >]

Do i have to specify a numeric id for a user and group resources to make sure that gid == uid?

for example, I want to use jboss  user and jboss group in my jboss cookbook

I also would like to avoid having to keep track of all the uids and gids in my various cookbooks

I get an error when I try to do the following

user "jboss"

group "jboss" do

    action "modify"

    members [ 'bob', 'fred', 'sally' ]

end

I get the error:

 "jboss" group does not exist

I don't get this error if I specify uid in the user resource and then the same number for the gid in the group resource.

Is there any way I can avoid having to use numeric ids in such cases? It would save a lot of accounting

I need to add members to the jboss group because I have a handy little sudo rule that lets my devs start and stop the jboss demon 

deep inside /etc/sudoers

%jboss  ALL=(jboss) NOPASSWD: ALL

%jboss  ALL=(jboss) NOPASSWD: /sbin/service [a-zA-Z]*